Green Ribbon Club - Membership

Membership

The frequenters of the club were the extreme faction of the country party, the men who supported Titus Oates, and who were concerned in the Rye House Plot and Monmouth's rebellion. Roger North tells us that they admitted all strangers that were confidingly introduced, for it was a main end of their institutions to make proselytes, especially of the raw estated youth newly come to town. According to Dryden (Absalom and Achitophel) drinking was the chief attraction, and the members talked and organized sedition over their cups.

Thomas Dangerfield supplied the court with a list of forty-eight members of the Green Ribbon Club in 1679; and although Dangerfield's numerous perjuries make his unsupported evidence worthless, it receives confirmation as regards several names from a list given to James II by Nathan Wade in 1685 (Harleian manuscripts 1845), while a number of more eminent personages are mentioned in The Cabal, a satire published in 1680, as also frequenting the club.

From such sources it appears that the duke of Monmouth himself, and statesmen like Halifax, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Macclesfield, Cavendish, Bedford, Grey of Warke, were among those who fraternized at the King's Head Tavern with third-rate writers such as Scroop, Mulgrave and Shadwell; with remnants of the Cromwellian régime like Lord Falconbridge, John Claypole and Henry Ireton (two sons-in-law and a grandson of the old Protector); with such profligates as Lord Howard of Escrick and Sir Henry Blount; and with scoundrels of the type of Dangerfield and Oates.

An allusion to Dangerfield, notorious among his other crimes and treacheries for a seditious paper found in a meal-tub, is found in connection with the club in The Loyal Subject's Litany, one of the innumerable satires of the period, in which occur the lines:

"From the dark-lanthorn Plot, and the Green Ribbon Club From brewing sedition in a sanctified Tub, Libera nos, Domine."